Public meeting on $18 fee set for Wednesday

Contractors for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality move a pile of waste at the closed NABORS landfill at Three Brothers in November. A town hall meeting to discuss the court-mandated $18 solid waste fee imposed on Twin Lakes Area landowners is scheduled for Wednesday at 2 p.m. at the Baxter County Courthouse.(Photo11: Scott Liles/The Baxter Bulletin)Buy Photo

A town hall-style meeting to discuss a court-mandated $18 solid waste fee levied against Twin Lakes Area landowners will be held next week in Mountain Home.

The meeting — organized by State Rep. Nelda Speaks. State Sen. Scott Flippo and State Rep. Jack Fortner — is scheduled for 2 p.m. Wednesday in the courtroom of the Baxter County Courthouse. Representatives from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and other government agencies will be on hand to answer questions.

The $18 fee is being collected to repay $12 million in defaulted bonds originally issued by the Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District, which includes Baxter, Boone, Carroll, Marion, Newton and Searcy counties. That fee appears on landowners’ 2017 property tax statements and will be collected when those taxes are paid.

The order applying the fee to landowners in the six-county district was signed into effect on April 21, 2017, by Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Tim Fox, and ordered to be included on real estate tax statements mailed out by those counties beginning in 2018.

The $18 fee is applied to a parcel of land that has some sort of improvement, be it a house, garage, barn, office or warehouse. The fee is applied to each parcel, so a landowner with two separate parcels of land would pay the fee twice.

The fee is not applied to personal property like vehicles, boats or machinery.

Judge Fox’s order requires that the fee be paid before any property taxes are satisfied. That means any property owner paying just what is owed tax-wise to the county will be short $18 and could face a delinquent penalty if it is not paid in full by October’s property tax deadline.

The Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District purchased the RLH landfill in Three Brothers in 2005 by issuing $12.3 million in bonds backed by the landfill’s tipping fees, the charges paid to the landfill by trash haulers. As those tipping fees rose to cover the maintenance and operation of the landfill, counties began opting to send their trash to out-of-state landfills instead.

By 2012, only Baxter and Marion counties continued to use the now-renamed NABORS landfill, and the district’s board of directors halted operations as it found the project was no longer economically viable. With the landfill no longer providing a revenue stream, the district defaulted on it its bond payments in November 2012.

That led to the Bank of the Ozarks, acting as the trustee for the bondholders, suing the district for repayment. The district tried to file for bankruptcy protection, but the courts denied that action, saying the district could have been collecting fees for trash service from district residents, whether they used it or not.

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality has since stepped in to oversee the final closing of the shuttered landfill. Once the solid waste district’s bondholders are repaid, the $18 fee will be used reimburse the ADEQ for its expenses, which are estimated to cost more than $13 million.